The world-wide increase in telecommunications has created a need for faster communications and easier access to the systems that enable the telecommunications. Because of this global expansion, it is often difficult to establish and maintain a connection with a telecommunication system. For some services, a called telephonic number may selectively be associated with many terminating lines or physical terminations. Therefore, for these services there is a need to be able to quickly identify a terminating line that serviced a telephonic terminating device that is not working properly or is detective.
In existing telecommunication systems, a call trace identifies the calling party of a telephonic call. After a called party receives a harassing telephonic call, the called party must disconnect the telephonic call and receive a dial tone to be able to activate a call trace. Then the called party activates the call trace by dialing an activation code such as *77. After dialing the code, a call record containing the calling party, called party and time of day is printed on a security channel of the telephonic switching system that serves the called party.
Disadvantageously, existing call tracing techniques do not permit the calling party to originate a call trace. This is needed when the called number is associated with a multitude of terminating lines. For example, the terminating lines could be multi-line hunt groups or automatic call distributors. Thus, the calling party is unable to determine the terminating line of a telephonic call. In turn, errors in telecommunication systems are undetected and are not promptly fixed. Because errors are not detected, there is a decrease in the response time for access to the telecommunication system.